Well, who says being a progressive or should I say in this man’s case; a corporatist, Internationalist Democrat does not pay well?
I will let a well-known populist explain, take it away Jim Hightower:
[podcast]
A snippet of Hightower on the subject, But please, go read the rest:
Novelist Thomas Wolfe famously wrote: “You can’t go home again.” But Eric Holder has proven him wrong.
Holder, who was President Obama’s Attorney General until stepping down earlier this year, recently returned to his old home place – Covington & Burling. Where’s that? Well, it’s not actually a place, but a powerhouse Washington lobbying-and-corporate-lawyering outfit. It runs interference in Washington for such Wall Street clients as Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo – and it’s a place where Holder definitely feels at home.
After serving as a deputy attorney general in the 1990s (where he demonstrated a kind and gentle approach to prosecuting corporate crime), Holder was invited in 2001 to leave his government job and join the corporate covey of Covington & Burling lawyers. There, he happily hauled water for big name corporations until tapped to re-enter the government in 2009 as AG.
The most striking thing about his six-year run as America’s top lawyer was his ever-so-delicate treatment of the Wall Street banksters who crashed our economy in 2008. Despite blatant cases of massive fraud and finagling, Holder failed to prosecute even one of the top Wall Streeters involved. Indeed, he kindly de-prioritized criminal prosecution of mortgage fraud and even publicly embraced the soft-on-corporate-crime notion that Wall Street banks are “Too big to fail” and “Too big to jail.
Lee Fang at the Intercept has more:
The Covington & Burling client list has included four of the largest banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Lobbying records show that Wells Fargo is still a client of Covington. Covington recently represented Citigroup over a civil lawsuit relating to the bank’s role in Libor manipulation.
Covington was also deeply involved with a company known as MERS, which was later responsible for falsifying mortgage documents on an industrial scale. “Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and several other large banks,” according to an investigation by Reuters.
The Department of Justice under Holder not only failed to pursue criminal prosecutions of the banks responsible for the mortgage meltdown, but in fact de-prioritized investigations of mortgage fraud, making it the “lowest-ranked criminal threat,” according to an inspector general report.
For insiders, the Holder decision to return to Covington was never a mystery. Timothy Hester, the chairman of Covington, told the National Law Journal that Holder’s return to the firm had been “a project” of his ever since Holder left to the join the administration in 2009. When the firm moved to a new building last year, it kept an 11th-story corner office reserved for Holder.
I guess being a corporatist Democrat; all the while kicking dirt in the faces of the working class, the UAW and other labor unions pays well, very well.
I might be a conservative today. But, I have not forgotten my UAW family upbringing and my middle class roots. I also know how the Democratic Party and UAW’s relationship has been frosty since Clinton’s selling of the autoworkers up the river with NAFTA.
It just saddens me, that the UAW does not break from the AFL-CIO’s grip and decides to embrace, at least some sort of conservative populism. Because, quite frankly, the Democratic Party does not give a darn about them anymore. They see the organized labor movement as more of an annoyance than anything else. One that they must give lip service to, in order to get elected. Now, there are conservatives who hate unions; I get that. but they are not the whole of the Conservative movement.
This post and the quote above, is a perfect example of what I have written about in the past; about how the Democrats, when they are running for President, will say, “I am looking out for you!” and all the while they are filling their pockets with money. It is called limousine liberalism. It is basically what the Democratic Party is today.
This is why, that in 2008, I decided that it was time to vote differently and I did. 🙂